STATE EDUCATION: A HELP OR HINDRANCE? 59 i 



erty for all. Happiness is the aim that we must suppose attached to 

 human existence ; and therefore each man must be free within those 

 limits which the like freedom of others imposes on him to judge for 

 himself in what consists his happiness. As soon as this view is once 

 clearly seen, we then see what the state has to do and from what it 

 has to abstain. It has to make such arrangements as are necessary to 

 insure the enjoyment of this liberty by all, and to restrain aggressions 

 upon it. Wherever it undertakes duties outside this special trust 

 belonging to it, it is simply exaggerating the rights of some who 

 make up the nation and diminishing the rights of others. Being itself 

 the creature of liberty, that is to say, called into existence for the pur- 

 poses of liberty, it becomes organized against its own end whenever 

 it deprives men of the rights of free judgment and free action for the 

 sake of other objects, however useful or desirable they may be. 



It is on account of our continued failure to recognize this law of 

 liberty that we still live, like the old border chieftains, in a state of 

 mutual suspicion and terror. Far the larger amount of intolerance 

 that exists in the world is the result of our own political arrange- 

 ments, by which we compel ourselves to struggle, man against man, 

 like beasts of different kinds bound together by a cord, each trying 

 to destroy the other out of a sense of self-preservation. It is evident 

 that the most fair-minded man must become intolerant if you place 

 him in a position where he has only the unpleasant choice either to 

 eat or be eaten, either to submit to his neighbor's views or force his 

 own views upon his neighbor. Cut the cord, give us full freedom for 

 differing among ourselves, and it at once becomes possible for a man 

 to hold by his own convictions, and yet be completely tolerant of what 

 his neighbor says and does. 



I come now to another great evil belonging to our system. The 

 effort to provide for the education of children is a great moral and 

 mental stimulus. It is the great natural opportunity of forethought 

 and self-denial ; it is the one daily lesson of unselfishness which men 

 will learn when they will pay heed to none other. There is no factor 

 that has played so large a part in the civilization of men as the slow 

 formation in parents of those qualities which lead them to provide for 

 their children. In this early care and forethought are probably to be 

 found the roots of those things which we value so highly affection, 

 sympathy, and restraint of the graspings of self for the good of otbers. 

 We may be uncertain about many of the agents that have helped to 

 civilize men, but here we can hardly doubt. What, then, is likely to 

 be the effect when, heedless of the slow and painful influences under 

 which character is formed, you intrude a huge, all-powerful something 

 you call the state between parents and children, and allow it to say 

 to the former : " You need trouble yourself no more about the educa- 

 tion of your children. There is no longer any occasion for that patience 

 and unselfishness which you were beginning to acquire, and under the 



